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Without Cats and LOLs life is not worth living. Civilization will collapse out of shear apathy.

On the plus side, global warming will not be a problem because all economic activity will cease and no fossil fuel will be consumed.

Japan and the US will be particularly hard hit. Parts of the EU as well. It's more uncertain what will happen to emerging economies like China, India and Brazil. LOL and/or cats is such a world wide phenomenon that no place will escape unscathed.

No matter what the Amazon will start to recover when Amazon ceases to operate.

First, a message sent out by the Chinese authorities to not comment on the attack.

The following censorship instructions, issued to the media by government authorities, have been leaked and distributed online. The name of the issuing body has been omitted to protect the source.

Regarding the large-scale distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on GitHub, do not conjecture or comment of your own accord before the authoritative media have reported the case, and do not republish foreign coverage. (March 28, 2015)

Next, the two specific targets of the attack.

The DDoS attack “weaponizes” Internet users outside China who visit websites containing Baidu tracking code. As long as they remain on an affected site, their browser will quietly make repeated requests to the GitHub URLs of censorship monitoring and circumvention project GreatFire.org and its censorship-evading Chinese New York Times mirror, in an effort to overwhelm GitHub’s servers.

This is what GreatFire, the target of the attack, had to say:

When we first blogged about this attack we did not want to level accusations without evidence. Based on the technical forensic evidence provided above and the detailed research that has been done on the GitHub attack, we can now confidently conclude that the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) is responsible for both of these attacks [the ongoing one against GitHub, and another against GreatFire earlier this month].

[] Inserting malicious code in this manner can only be done via the Chinese Internet backbone. Even if CAC did not launch the DDoS attack directly, they are responsible for managing the internet in China and it is not possible that they did not know what was happening. These attacks have occurred under CAC’s watch and would have needed the approval of Lu Wei.

Lu Wei and the Cyberspace Administration of China have clearly escalated the tactics that they use to control information. The Great Firewall has switched from being a passive, inbound filter to being an active and aggressive outbound one. This is a frightening development and the implications of this action extend beyond control of information on the internet. In one quick movement, the authorities have shifted from enforcing strict censorship in China to enforcing Chinese censorship on internet users worldwide. CAC can launch these attacks quickly and easily and they have the technical and financial resources behind them to continue to launch DDoS attacks against any website, anywhere in the world.

GitHub is used by GreatFire as a way around Chinese government censorship by the Great Firewall. Here's what GitHub had to say about the attack.

GitHub commented last week that “we believe the intent of this attack is to convince us to remove a specific class of content,” apparently referring to GreatFire’s censorship circumvention tools. GitHub’s compliance would resolve a dilemma for Chinese censors: the site’s HTTPS encryption prevents blocking its contents selectively, and its ubiquity in the tech industry would impose a high economic toll on blocking the entire site. This “collateral freedom” strategy is central to GreatFire’s circumvention projects on other platforms, such as Amazon’s and Microsoft’s.

It's very even handed of the Slashdot Pundits to support the Chinese government contention that they are just poor innocent bystanders who haven't ever censored anybody ever. Of course it's way to much effort to go online and find out what the attack victims think. Our Pundit class never bothers with fact finding, because they already know everything they need to know. When your eagle eye vantage point is a bedroom in your parents' basement you can confidently decide who's truly responsibility in any situation. Thank you Slashdot Pundits, where would be be without you?

Was ULA making any investment in propulsion technology? Well they started using the Russian RD-180 in 2000 and didn't start looking for a replacement until 2014. This was after SpaceX starting to compete with them for heavy launch contracts and everyone realized that Russia could stop deliveries because of political considerations.

Meanwhile, Space has been continuously investing in new rocket technology, primarily with their own money. They haven't made any profit yet, it's ongoing reinvestment.

As this article shows, they are even working on extending the state of the art by extending CFD technology so that rocket engine design can benefit from advanced computation capabilities.

So how much new technology did ULA produce? What did the taxpayers get for the $1 billion per year above and beyond paying for actual launches? Sound of crickets...

Welcome to our post capitalism system. Entrenched special interests get guaranteed profit and government subsidies, obscene tax breaks and use government regulation to keep out any competition. SpaceX just got hit by the regulation trap: US Air Force Overstepped in SpaceX Certification. The report came out about two weeks ago well after the damage was already done. Business as usual. No one will be held to account.

This obvious sabotage resulted because the USAF/Lockheed/Boeing are for all practical purposes a unified conglomerate. They are all insiders, The military and government employees know that as soon as they leave the US payroll they will go to the (not really) civilian side and make even more money. When they retire from their civilian jobs they get two retirement packages: double dipping.

First, they are applying security through obscurity. Since it's pre-broken, only those who can think out of the box will be able to apply.

Second, it's a great way to screen applicants. Only those who are truly adept and motivated will get through this barrier to entry.

I think this is the wave of the future. Employers can put up broken application sites and only look at the candidates that can figure it out. They don't even have to spend much to make it bad in the first place. Just outsource it to the lowest bidder, preferably in a country with a different language. Heck, have them do it in their native language and then apply some cheap ass internationalization package.

All this needs is a catchy name that sounds cool like "scrum" or "cloud scale" and it will become the next big thing. There will be certificate programs in whatever it's called and "Whatever it's called for Dummies". Wired and the Wall Street Journal will write articles. Hop on that bandwagon now and make those big bucks!

Required Snark (1702878) writes "Muon Tomography images have revealed core meltdown in the Unit 1 and Unit 2 reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi power station. Different techniques were used for each unit. The core material is no longer in the reactor pressure vessels, but the images do no show where the corium (melted reactor core material) ended up.

Each Fukushima reactor melted core has around 125 tons of corium. Chernobyl has around 180 tons and Three Mile Island about 20 short tons. In TMI the meltdown was partial and the corium was contained by the pressure vessel, unlike Fukushima and Chernobyl.

Fukushima Unit 3 has not been scanned. It's feasible to use muon imaging to find where the corium ended up, but that requires constructing pits for the muon sensors."

So are you a degenerate liar or just dumber then a box of rocks? The truth took a mindless Google search and about 20 seconds. Are you incapable of that level effort or do you expect that everyone one else is as uninformed as you are and will believe whatever drivel you post?

So go back to where you live in your mother's basement and look for the radioactive CIA mind control scorpions and leave the rest of us surface dwellers alone.

You don't understand our new post-captialist economy. In post-capitalism, entrenched special interest have a right to make money and the basic purpose of government is to enact laws that insure profit. That is the law of the land manifest in the DCMA. So, for example, Kurig is using DRM to eliminate competition on refills for their machines.

Post-capitalism also conveniently eliminates pesky constitutional guarantees enforcing the rule of law. Contractual language can now eliminate search warrants and right of privacy when Stingray cellphone technology is used for mass surveillance. Both government and private enterprise benefit in post-capitalism.

Broadband providers have just as much right as any other business to run an entrenched monopolistic enterprise and make vast amounts of money. I fully expect that the current court system will correct the loopholes that threaten their guaranteed profitability, and give them the same protection under the law that other corrupt special interests enjoy in our post-capitalist system.

When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago

This is similar to what happened in geology when plate tectonics became accepted. There were a cadre of crusty (pun intended) old professors who just flat out rejected the idea that the surface of the earth could move like that. They stuck to their guns, and some of them spent their final years in academia trying to refute tectonic theory. I heard about this when I was a rockhound as a kid and went to amateur geology events.

I don't know if at that time anyone accused those adopting the new theory as being personally corrupt, but doubt it. Those were different times. However, when this guy starts calling the APS corrupt he's clearly gone into the weeds.

In reality there is corruption in the climate change debate, and it's all on the side of the fossil fuel advocates. They have a lot of money at stake, and they spend a relatively large amount defending their wealth. The poster boys for this are the Koch brothers, although they are not alone.